


Somebody's Waiting For Someone

by stellatundra



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: F/M, Pre-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-11
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-03-01 01:55:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2755232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stellatundra/pseuds/stellatundra
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It might be Tommy he goes to France for, but it’s Ada he comes home for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Somebody's Waiting For Someone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [growlery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/growlery/gifts).



> Happy yuletide, growlery! This isn't quite curtain fic, but it is Ada/Freddie.

Somebody’s Waiting For Someone

 

Freddie never, ever tells Ada this, but she isn’t the first Shelby he falls in love with. 

The first is Polly, when he’s too young to have anything more than the most abstract idea of love and marriage. She wears a purple hat with feathers, the like of which he’s never seen before, and he tells her, stammering, that she looks beautiful. She laughs fit to burst and sends him packing. He makes the mistake of telling Tommy he’s going to marry her when he grows up and Tommy gives him a bloody nose. That’s enough to knock the feelings out of him, right enough, and by the time the break’s healed, her place in his affections has been supplanted by a sleek black bicycle John’s nicked from somewhere or other.

The second is Tommy. Half of Birmingham is in love with Tommy Shelby, or so it seems. He’s an inscrutable, dangerous man, even before the war. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal. It’s all very platonic, of course. Freddie has enough reasons people might want to kick his head in as it is, no sense in adding to it. As for Tommy, he’s always very careful. Even when he’s doing something that seems sheer foolhardy recklessness, he’s got plans for every eventuality.

Freddie follows him to France, and that says enough. If it weren’t for Tommy, there’s no way he’d be knee deep in mud, getting shot at and shat on, risking life and limb for a king and country that don’t give a flying fuck about him in return. Whether Tommy appreciates it or not. 

The war changes everything, of course. The everyday drudgery and squalor isn’t so different from life back home in Small Heath. At first, the trenches are almost an improvement, more chance of being fed and the only difference is the bloke who’s looking to shoot you speaks another language. But it drags on, and on. Only a couple of times does Freddie catch a glimpse of a general: boots without holes in, well greased moustache, a far cry from the filth and bones of the soldiers around him. It’s not fair, Freddie thinks, knowing that even when those who survive will go home - perhaps missing a limb or part of their mind - the best they can expect is more of the same, only in a factory rather than a foreign bloody field. He makes up his mind that if he survives he’s going to fight with everything he has to make things better. 

 

Ada kisses him on the night before they all leave for France. It’s a jolly old knees up in The Garrison, fake cheer and false bravado that turns Freddie’s stomach sour. He goes outside for some fresh air, or as fresh as the air full of stink and ash smog can be. She follows him, purposeful. She’s in a thin white dress, yellowing at the hem, somebody’s hand-me-down that’s too big for her and slipping down at the shoulder. She looks like a parody of a high society debutante.

Ada pulls the cigarette from his mouth and takes a drag.

“Hey,” he protests. She stares at him levelly, cool as you like.

“Stupid boys,” she says, “all of you.” There’s a fierceness and a world-weary exasperation in her tone he doesn’t expect. Borrowed from Polly, he supposes, like that stole around her shoulders. Freddie doesn’t have anything to say, any excuse to offer, but she doesn’t seem to be waiting for a reply. “You’d better come back,” she says, thumb jabbing into his chest. “All of you.” Freddie thinks he wouldn’t dare not to.

Then she leans in and he can feel the warmth of her body through the thin material of her shift. She kisses him fiercely and clumsily. He barely has time to register the determined pressure of her lips against his before she’s gone, disappearing back into the bright warmth of the pub.

That’s where it starts, he supposes, the germ of love which somehow, even in the most inhospitable conditions imaginable, grows into a steady passion.

 

It might be Tommy he goes to France for, but it’s Ada he comes home for. 

 

He doesn’t have a photograph, like some of the others. Reckons it might be bad luck if he did. Her never thinks of her as his sweetheart, there’s nothing sweet about it. She becomes necessary to him in a way he can’t quite explain, even to himself. 

Ada writes to Tommy and asks after him. Freddie sends his regards, when Tommy writes back, which isn’t frequent. When Tommy is injured the first time and laid up for a week in a filthy field hospital, it’s Freddie that takes over the writing, to let the family know what’s happened. Ada writes back, and they see no reason to stop the correspondence when Tommy recovers.

Once she sends him a lock of hair. Freddie keeps it in a tin with his cigarettes. The first time one of the others catches sight of it, he hits upon the theory that it belongs to a French whore. Freddie doesn’t discourage the notion, and only smiles implacably when they rib him about having caught the pox.

As the war goes on, he sees the men around him slip away. Freddie fixes his mind on the future. After the war, the things he’ll do. Ada features more and more prominently in his daydreams until it comes that he can’t imagine a future without her. 

 

And then one day the war is over, just like that; little glory in it, only a feeling of suspended relief, like they should feel happy and maybe one day they might, but so much has been lost. Freddie can’t help but wonder what it’s all been for, when he looks around him at the gaunt, dirty faces of his comrades. He reads the papers, some people say England can never go back to the way it was before. Freddie thinks he’ll make damned sure it doesn’t. 

Small Heath is a long way from the bright centre of change, though, if such a thing does exist. Plague follows war, natural as it is horrible. Men must work and scrap to get on. Nothing is fair. 

But there is Ada. Freddie can’t look at himself and imagine that she could want him, but she does. She’s a woman grown, four years of war and waiting having given her a hardened edge, the way it has all of them. Some of the men think they’re the only ones to be changed by war but Freddie looks in Ada’s eyes and knows that’s not the case.

She believes in the cause and she believes in him. This time when she kisses him, it’s thoroughly, staking claim to her territory. Freddie wonders with a pang of unexpected jealousy where she learnt to kiss like that. She’ll have none of his protests, that he has nothing to offer her, that the rest of the Shelby clan will string him up for despoiling their little sister. She’s a Shelby through and through and shoots down all of his objections one by one. 

It won’t be easy of course. They’re bound to get caught, they’ve nothing to live on. But it’s something, the same something that kept him going through the dark and the fear of those tunnels. It’s something worth waiting for and he’d be a fool not to grasp it with both hands and cling on for dear life.


End file.
